Ryman initially wrote a short story forThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction entitled "Have Not Have", which was included in the April 2001 edition[4] (later reprinted in the June 2014 issue ofClarkesworld Magazine[5]). This was expanded into a novel initially titledAir: Or, Have Not Have, and renamed to justAir in all editions since the first.
Air is the story of a town's fashion expert Chung Mae, a smart butilliterate peasant woman in a small village in the fictional country of Karzistan (loosely based on the country ofKazakhstan), and her suddenly leading role in reaction to dramatic, worldwide experiments with a newinformation technology called Air. Air is information exchange, not unlike theInternet, that occurs in everyone's brain and is intended to connect the world. After a test of Air is imposed on Mae's unprepared mountain town, everyone and everything changes, especially Mae who was deeper into Air than any other person. Afterwards, Mae struggles to prepare her people for what is to come while learning all about the world outside her home.
F&SF reviewer Robert. K. J. Killheffer praised Ryman's "humane insight and sympathy" and "incisive meditations on the process of social and cultural change," concluding that the novel is "not merely powerful, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving, but indispensable."[6]
A country calledKarzistan also appears in the video gameBeyond: Two Souls, where it's an East Asian country having a similar condenser, a portal to theInfraworld (the ghost world), like the United States. The protagonist Jodie Holmes has to destroy the condenser during aCIA mission.
